This prompt made me think of gentlemen’s gentlemen, of Jeeves and Bunter. But the only Wodehouse that I have in the house is Psmith in the City, and I’ve already used Sayers. So I thought I’d broaden the idea out to all the sidekicks, to the ones who exist as a sounding board for their main characters and the ones who are several steps ahead of them. The ones who exist because somebody in this book needs to be in touch with reality, and the ones who exist because the main character couldn’t cope without them.

So here’s to you, Bunter and Jeeves. Here’s to you, Passepartout. Here’s to you, Captain Hastings. Here’s to you, Doctor Watson and here’s to you, Miss Moneypenny. I’m glad somebody wrote you some books of your own.

One reads the Thursday Next series as much for the literary snarking as for the plot. And shelving is part of that snarking.

‘The sub-genre of Literary Smut has finally been disbanded with Fanny Hill and Moll Flanders being transferred to Racy Novel and Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Human Drama.’

We diligently wrote it all down…

Entirely coincidentally, this is the top shelf of my bookcase. I will confess that I have cropped this picture quite severely in order to make the dust less obvious. That – besides a dreadful picture – is what you get for taking photographs above your head.

My own system of shelving is bound by the physical constraints of book size and shelf height. I try to keep series and authors together, but otherwise it’s a free-for-all. To the left of Jasper Fforde there’s Damon Runyan; to the right, Archy and Mehitabel.

This has been my favourite Lent book for a very long time, and, as I slowly work my way through past series of Star Trek and get round to reading sci-fi classics that I’ve been hearing out forever, it only becomes more so. The metaphors of exploration, of setting out into the unknown with little but faith in the merits of the endeavour for sustenance, of coming to terms with mysteries that must always be beyond our comprehension, resonate deeply.

Lent is often a difficult time of year for me: it’s the very beginning of spring, and I find myself thinking that everything should be fine now that we’re out of winter, but in actual fact it takes my body a while to catch up. Remembering that Lent isn’t actually meant to be easy helps. Sometimes it’s something to engage with; sometimes the best I can do is hope to endure it.

It feels as if I’m getting further and further away (from what? from reality, from what I want to be doing, from the Divine), but in the end it brings me closer.

About a decade ago, I had a temp job in the local hospital. I was based in the library and my task was to go through the shelves and find books that had updated editions, journals that were now available online, and so on, so that outdated material could be replaced with more recent thinking.

In among the back issues of The Lancet and The Journal of Otorhinolaryngology there were some really interesting books, and I spent quite a few of my breaks reading through The End of Innocence: Britain in the time of AIDS and Suffer the Children: the story of thalidomide, as well as a book whose title I can’t remember but which was about planning a hospital’s response to potential disasters.

And then there was Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, which I, a year on from the end of my English Literature degree in which I’d paid a lot of attention to the Victorians, found absolutely fascinating. The illness in which she’s mostly interested is tuberculosis, or consumption if you want to be all romantic about it. She dissects the disconnect between the horrors of the disease itself and the otherworldly depiction it receives in so many nineteenth century novels. (I wrote ‘Victorian’ at first, but of course one of the most famous is La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas fils.)

I do not possess copies of any of the books I’ve talked about here, so here are two that deal with tuberculosis. Poor Helen Burns in Jane Eyre shares the fate of two of Charlotte Brontë’s sisters: dying of the disease at boarding school. Last year, we had The Essex Serpent in which the suffering character, Stella Ransome, experiences a spes pthisica that manifests as an obsession with all things blue. I’ve included that blue glass bottle (with its distinctly unVictorian plastic spray top) in her honour.